LOVE IS THE ROAR OF A CHAINSAW, CUTTING FLESH IN THE NIGHT
If I were a musician who released albums, rather than a writer, this collection would likely come with the subtitle B-Sides and Rarities. The stories published here are a motley assemblage compared to my first two collections, and draws upon publications in some hard-to-find anthologies, out-of-print omnibus editions, or magazines that have closed their doors.
This story may be one of the rarest of rarities. In 2014 the creators of a mobile game, Dead End Alley, commissioned four Australian horror authors to write a piece from the same prompt: A blind alley, a swarm of hungry zombies, a chainsaw, and you.
This was my contribution, published on Facebook and the Dead End Alley webpage alongside stories from Alan Baxter, Kaaron Warren, and Deborah Biancotti.
Around the time I wrote this two of my closest friends were in the process of assembling their own survival kit, and they’d just informed me the American Center for Disease Control and Preventions hosted zombie preparedness guidelines on its website. They’re definitely worth a Google if you haven’t read them—it never hurts to prepare.
ONE LAST FIRST DATE BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD
This story began with a challenge challenged to write a story based on a random word, and mine was limerence—the state of mind that results from romantic attraction and the desire to form a relationship and have one’s feelings reciprocated. It’s also known as the first three months of dating, when you’re figuring things out and drunk on the dopamine hit, eager to spend all your time together. The period where certain traits get overlooked in the rush, even if they might serve as warning signs a few months down the track.
It might seem like the end of the world seemed is a pretty big thing to overlook while in the limerence state, but I would argue that humanity is fantastic at ignoring looming threats of extinction in general.
COUNTING DOWN
Some short stories have interesting origins, worthy of becoming tales unto themselves. I've written stories based on a dare, or because I wanted to prove someone wrong, or because friends have told me a certain story needed to exist but wasn't out there yet.
This isn't one of those—it's the result of listening to The Birthday Party's Release the Bats on repeat and not getting a lot of sleep. There is only so long that combination can continue before you start wondering where the bats are being released from...
THE PLACE BEYOND THE BRAMBLES
Originally inspired by a piece from the Australian artist Terry Whidborne, produced for a short story project from the Brisbane-based Tiny Owl Workshop. Through various trials and tribulations, it ended up being published at Daily Science Fiction instead.
While Tiny Owl didn’t publish this story, they’re responsible for producing the most unique publication in my publishing history. In 2013 they commissioned work for their Pillow Fight! project, seeking out flash fictions they’d print onto the cushions used at the Brisbane Writers Festival lounge later that year. This is my story, originally printed on a large pillow, now presented here as a little bonus for people who enjoy reading Story Notes.
Just Another Night of Bad Decisions
Hal Tucker was one of those guys, you know? Ugly and unpleasant, but he had a magnetic presence. I figured him for an all-right bloke.
I was out back, on smoko, when I heard the news.
“You hear old Tucker got himself gutted?” Mitch sat on the steps and tapped free a cigarette, lighting it with a flourish. “They found him down in the park this morning. Someone tore his guts open and played cats-cradle with his intestines.”
I stopped eating and pushed the plate away. Mitch Roy was a prick in every way that mattered. He considered himself The Man 'cause he managed a joint on the Gold Coast strip. I work part time at his restaurant as a short-order cook, 'cause there isn’t exactly a steady career in freelance occultism. Mitch took up my discarded plate and started picking at the leftover chunks of beef in the madras.
I don’t remember what I said in return—I was too busy thinking. I’d seen Tucker down by the underpass two days ago, another crazy burn-out. He’d offered me a sword and the chance to stand vigil with him, face down whatever evils passed into this world. I told him maybe some other time, when I wasn’t so shagged from working. Now, it was too late. Something bad got him, and I'd shirked my duty.
I stood, wiped my hands on my apron. "Listen, Mitch, I gotta go."
"Like hell," Mitch said. "You're halfway through your shift."
"It's important," I said.
Mitch shrugged. He didn't believe in magic, didn't believe in much beyond women and smokes, really. "Go," he said, "and you're gone for good."
I stayed. I needed the job.
They found Mitch floating in the canals later that night.
He should have let me go hunting the werewolves, I guess.
THE THINGS YOU DO WHEN THE WAR BREAKS OUT
My friend, Kathleen Jennings, will occasionally take the weird diversions that twitter conversations amble down and transform them into small, post-it note illustrations. One week, after a discussion about the history of flight, dinosaurs, and Terrance Haile’s Space Train, she came up with a quick sketch that fused the three.
I started wondering about the people on the train, and why the pterodactyls were there, and somewhere along the line the story took a far darker turn than expected.
WINGED, WITH SHARP TEETH
Another story inspired by a Kathleen Jennings twitter sketch, this time a winged crocodile with a particularly smug grin. You can still see it online, if Twitter hasn’t yet self-destructed in whatever timeline you read this.
I started this story years ago, writing paragraphs on my lunch break at work. I finished in 2019 while my father was in the hospital—the first of several trips. At the time, I wasn’t truly conscious of how much his Parkinson’s and growing dementia had become part of the background noise of our family life. Looking back on the early drafts, after his death, it seems incredibly obvious.
UPON DISCOVERING A GHOST IN THE FIVE STAR
I was in a slump where nothing I wrote worked properly and needed a quick break. I spun up some online writing prompts and amused myself by writing quick, goofy flash pieces based on whatever I found.
One prompt was visual: a photograph of a young, pale girl with a balloon in her hands. It wasn’t a big jump to transform her into a ghost, and I’d been making notes about a series of laundromat stories for years. What started as fun writing exercise quickly expanded into a full story.
One day, I’ll finish the next three entries in the Laundromat series.
TITHES
Jennifer Brozek was putting together an anthology about magic Hobo Nickels and needed a pinch hitter to fill a gap. She asked if I could put together a 5,000 word story about a coin bringing misery to the protagonist in the next five days.
It’s rare that I can finish anything that fast from a standing start, but I wanted to give it a shot. Unfortunately, it was the week I started my only full-time office job, which meant running on very little sleep in order to get the story done.
Tithes shares the universe of my Keith Murphy stories, themselves published in two separate projects helmed by Brozek. While Nate, Byron, and Angela are dealing with their own problems, the real joy was bringing in one of my favourite Keith Murphy supporting characters—the demon Randall—and letting him play saviour rather than the villain.
THE MINOTAURS & THE SIGNAL GHOSTS
Written for Robin Laws The Lion and the Aardvark, an anthology of contemporary fables building on the traditions of Aesop. I skipped ahead to write a fable from a cyberpunk future instead.
HORNETS ATTACK YOUR BEST FRIEND VICTOR AND OTHER THINGS WE CALLED THE BAND
My partner’s favourite superhero is Dazzler, and I like writing horror stories about the Gold Coast. We weren’t dating yet, but I wanted to write something she might enjoy.
It’s also an attempt to capture the experience of seeing art-focused bands such as The Dirty Three or The Paradise Motel play venues in the heart of the Gold Coast’s tourist districts, and a lament for the various live music clubs that have disappeared over the years.
EIGHT MINUTES OF USABLE DAYLIGHT
A story with its beginnings in tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, where the idea of liquid sunlight is just another day at the office for vampire-hunting adventurers and cities cloaked in eternal darkness are a staple backdrop.
Like most D&D things, the real fun comes when you remove them from their original context and start asking questions.
THE MIKE & CARLY STORY, WITHOUT THE GOSSIP
This is an enormously fun story to read aloud, and it’s been my go-to for public events ever since it was first published in the late, lamented Shimmer magazine.
I wrote it to experiment with the narrative voice and the power of a narrator who both speaks directly to the reader and engages in editorialising as the story progresses. It’s a friendly kind of story, and it makes me happy every time I come across it.
A WHITE CROSS BESIDE A LONELY ROAD
I wrote the first draft while attending Clarion South back in 2007, trying my hand a ghost story. It was a step outside my comfort zone, and the feedback was generally positive, but suggested it needed something more—an edge that made it stand out, or a bit more depth to the story. It didn’t feel like anything else I’d written across the six week’s we spent together and didn’t fit with a lot of the other stuff I’d written around that time.
I wrote the final draft nearly a decade later, while taking Neil Gaiman’s online Masterclass and experimenting with the exercises he used to refine an idea and develop it. I’m not sure why I chose to revisit A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road, but I expect it’s because it’s a story that had given me trouble for so long.
It caught me by surprise when I opened a fresh page of my notebook and started working on it again, because the process unearthed a bunch of things about Alex and Brendan that had never quite appeared on the page before and showed me who they really were.
This may be a ghost story, but it’s not really about the ghost—what interested me is the way people get haunted by the expectations of others and judge their life by those standards.
RULE 34
Written for Heather Wood’s Gods, Memes, & Monsters: a 21st Century Bestiary about magical and mythological creatures in the present day.
At the time I was teaching workshops about using the internet as a writer, talking aspiring writers through the things they could be learning from things like fanfic and online publishing, and I’d frequently get reminders of just how accurate Rule 34 of the internet truly is: if you can imagine it, there is porn based on it.
And mythology already had a race of creatures known for wish fulfilment…
LOCAL HEROES
A story that exists because of my deep, affirming love of professional wrestling, which truly is more absurd and wonderful than most folks give it credit for. Every time folks try to explain that wrestling is fake, I point out the number of shows I’ve enjoyed featuring wrestling demons, wrestling vampires, wrestling bees, wrestling wizards, wrestling wombats, and imaginary hand grenades.
If you assume people watch pro-wrestling like it’s real, you’re obviously not paying attention.
I wrote a short, truncated version of this story as part of the first, serialised incarnation of Keith Murphy’s adventures. This expanded version emerged as a bonus story for Apocalypse Ink’s hardcover omnibus of the Keith Murphy novellas, Flotsam, representing a first glimpse at what Keith would be up to after the fight to prevent Ragnarök.